‘Down!’
Ethan ducked his head as he rolled off the rocky magma flow and a cloud of supersonic fragments of shattered blades and engine parts raced by overhead, smashing into the snow as the helicopter tore itself apart and came to rest on its side further down the mountain.
Ethan leaped to his feet and scrambled over the magma flow to see three of the four all-terrain vehicles belching diesel fumes as their engines started and they began pulling away from the encampment, the billowing tents left where they were as Yuri Polkov’s men made good their escape.
‘They’ve got the mummy,’ Ethan yelled as he spotted the mummy’s remains stuffed into a metal cage in the rear of one of the trucks. ‘Go for the rearmost vehicle’s tires!’
They were within thirty yards of the vehicle as it began to pull away, and Ethan threw himself down onto the hard rocks and pulled the AK-47 into his shoulder once more as he took careful aim and fired single shots one after the other at the spinning tire.
The all-terrain vehicle’s tires were designed not to be punctured, but nonetheless they could be shredded as a hail of fire ripped into it, Lopez firing with deadly aim alongside him. The shape of the tire broke down in front of Ethan’s eyes and the rear of the all-terrain vehicle slumped as the wheel was exposed and bit deep into the rocks. He heard the engine screech as the two occupants struggled to make good their escape, and Ethan shifted his aim to the windows of the cab as it passed by and fired two shots.
The window shattered and one of the men slumped forward as the bullet struck him in the forehead and sprayed blood across the glass and windscreen. The vehicle swerved violently to the right and its bumper collided with a rocky outcrop and pulled the vehicle to a halt as the engine failed.
Ethan got to his feet and rushed to the cab, Lopez hurrying to the opposite side and jabbing her weapon up at the window. Ethan yanked the passenger door open and the dead occupant tumbled out of the vehicle and thumped down onto the cold rocks at his feet. Inside the cab, the driver was likewise slumped over the wheel, one half of his face missing where he had been struck by a lucky ricochet.
Ethan hurried to the back of the all-terrain vehicle and checked the rear to see a spare tire firmly affixed to the rear access door. Inside, strapped to the rear seat, was the mummy. Satisfied, he turned to see Jarvis making his way down the hillside toward them. He looked up into the cloudy sky and saw the Catalina circling overhead just below the cloud base, its navigation and anti-collision beacons flickering as it turned away and began descending towards the north.
‘Arnie?’ Ethan asked Jarvis as the old man reached them, clearly out of breath. ‘You called Arnie?’
Jarvis gathered his breath and gestured to the Catalina with a jab of his thumb. ‘He’s been a busy boy, working for us, and handsomely paid I might add.’
Ethan watched as the Catalina disappeared into the clouds and Lopez hauled the dead bodies of the drivers out of the vehicle.
‘Where’s the mummy?’ Lucy asked, distraught as she saw the carnage around them.
‘We’ve got it,’ Ethan replied. ‘We need to work fast. Let’s get that tire changed!’
Lopez turned from her grisly work, her features quizzical. ‘What’s the rush? Lucy said that those remains were worthless, that she’s just a victim of ritualistic Inca head distortion, right?’
Lucy shook her head. ‘That’s true, the mummy itself has no use to us as its skull was deformed by her own people when she was born. But the women and girls chosen for sacrifice were considered special, and I think that I know why. The gold that she wore, and the expensive clothes, they were not for her.’
‘Well who were they for then?’ Ethan challenged as he yanked a jack from the rear of the vehicle.
Lucy smiled. ‘I’ll have to let you know about that.’
Ethan turned to Jarvis. ‘Where will Arnie go?’
‘Presumably back to the lake,’ Jarvis said. ‘But right now it’s not him I’m worried about.’
‘What do you mean?’
Jarvis lifted the satellite phone out of his pocket. ‘I didn’t just send a message to Arnie. I thought we were going to die, so I sent a signal out as widely as I could on an agency distress channel.’
Lopez’s features sagged. ‘Oh, no.’
‘I’m afraid it’s not just the cavalry coming, but everybody else too.’
Ethan wasted no more time as he helped Lucy and Lopez switch the tire out and then climbed aboard the truck. He started the engine even as thick snow was falling all around them, the skies darkening as the storm closed in.
Ethan turned on the headlights, and in the beams he saw a shadowy figure struggling against the wind down the mountain, leaning on a thin cane and waving desperately at them. Yuri Polkov’s heavily lined features, grey with cold, stared out at them from beneath his hood as he cried out, his mouth agape but his voice snatched away by the winds.
Ethan crunched the truck into gear and drove away from the plateau, and the old man’s phantom-like form vanished into the bitter, windswept darkness.
XXXVIII
The truck bounced and rattled down the rugged mountain tracks as Ethan guided it through the tumbling veils of snow falling thickly around them. Lopez sat next to him in the cab, with Jarvis, Lucy behind them in the rear seats and jabbering excitedly as she looked over her shoulder at the mummy.
‘We’ve got it! We’ve actually got it!’
‘Who is everybody else, exactly?’ Ethan demanded of Jarvis.
‘Anybody who was listening in on our frequency,’ Jarvis replied. ‘If Majestic Twelve are on our case they’ll have been monitoring all frequencies used by government agencies out here, hoping to catch us on the move. I reckoned they represented the better end of a bad deal, seeing as we were going to be shot and left on that mountain.’
‘If Arnie’s out of reach we’re not going to get off this mountain fast enough to evade detection,’ Ethan said. ‘They’ll send in their STS team and finish this for good, and nobody’s going to find us out here.’ He turned to Lopez. ‘How much ammunition do we have?’
‘No more than thirty rounds between us,’ Lopez replied as she examined the rifles she had tossed into the vehicle. ‘Yuri had at least thirty men with him, and they’re out in front of us.’
‘Maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll get lost,’ Jarvis offered.
Ethan looked ahead and began to slow the truck.
‘Lucky doesn’t much apply to Lopez and I,’ he said.
Ahead, a wall of flames burned fiercely across the plains as the truck descended the side of the mountain. Thick black smoke boiled up into the sky, battling the snow falling from the turbulent clouds. Ethan slowed the truck to a crawl and saw three vehicles, each identical to the one in which they sat, all engulfed in an inferno of raging flames. One of them was on its side in a ditch, blown clear off the road.
‘Polkov’s other men and their trucks,’ Lucy identified them.
Ethan slowed the truck to a halt, as before the three wrecked vehicles that blocked the track he saw the figures of at least a dozen armed men. All were dressed in black fatigues, weighed down with webbing and weapons, hands gloved and faces concealed behind black balaclavas.
‘STS,’ Jarvis confirmed with a single glance.
Ethan barely heard him. His gaze was instead affixed upon a lone man who stood at the centre of the STS troops. Dressed in a long, black coat that billowed in the wind, his hands shoved into the pockets and his collar turned up high about his neck, the man was tall and his skin as dark as the magma flows on the volcano behind them. He did not move, but simply stared ahead at Ethan and his companions.